I actually enjoyed this book a lot more than the first book in the series, The Twentieth Wife. The first book irritated me because I felt like the courtship between Mehrunissa and Salim/Jahangir felt very strained and inauthentic. It's hard to enjoy a book focused on the marriage plot when you don't buy the romance.

This book begun with Mehrunissa already in power as Empress Nur Jahan and was mainly about her scrabble for power and increasingly complex intrigues. There were a bunch of historical and semi-mythical stories about Nur Jahan that Indu Sundaresan sought to fictionalize and somewhat explain. It was enjoyable, especially since I know so little about the Moghul Empire in the first place.

All in all, I think this was an improvement over the first book and am excited to read the author's other novels.